Internet governance as seen from the Right to Development

Participatory democracy has been hijacked by
business-led multistakeholderism, and 'presence and power' are replaced as
tokens of people's political involvement.

Indian students gather for a protest against Facebook’s "Free Basics" in Hyderabad, India, Tuesday, December, 2015. Mahesh Kumar A/Press Association. All rights reserved.The mother of all controversies about the Internet is
about its global governance; neatly polarized between those who believe that it
is time to herald a new international institutional response adequate to our
collective predicament as 'things of the Internet', and status quoists who
believe that the Internet-mediated world order is serving us well, and any
change will portend ominous consequences for the Internet's future.

Status quoists have good reason to stall change. The
breakneck and almost sinister speed at which global digital capitalism has
risen together with its intimate US foreign policy connection reveal the force
majeure that the Internet is. For the US state and US Internet corporations –
Google, Facebook, Twitter – protecting the US government's unilateral control
over Internet governance is thus critical. The US state has repeatedly deployed
the political discourse of Internet freedom to assert an a priori
legitimacy to be the primary manager of the extraterritorial Internet. This has
also meant tactics to undermine emerging economic powers that challenge its
dominance, discrediting them for a poor human rights record.

The crisis of 'platform society'

An enabler of rights, the Internet is seen as
foundational to the achievement of other rights. Some governments have begun to
guarantee, in varying degrees, access to the Internet itself as a right. It is
clear, even though the marginalized in most developing countries still do not have
access to connectivity or are not connected in quite the same way as the privileged
to the gains of the Internet, that full participation in society is a function
of Internet enfranchisement.

Meanwhile, state surveillance on the one hand and
corporate tracking on the other, are constructing an all-pervasive datafied
society. Reaffirming the human right to privacy, the UNGA 's Second Committee,
which deals with economic and social issues, noted
in 2014, that unlawful or arbitrary
surveillance as well as the collection of personal data are highly intrusive
acts, violating rights to privacy and antithetical to the tenets of a democratic
society.

While critiques of the informational state and its
excesses are easily grasped, the magnitude of corporate surveillance is hardly
recognized. Partly, this is owing to the fact that each of us has almost
voluntarily relinquished information about our private lives in return for free
access to the goodies of the 'platform society' – from social media to search,
news feed and more. But, Internet platforms wield far-reaching power. This is
the power to discipline social behaviour – nudging our likes, aggrandizing
control to frame the rules of social interaction, and to dictate and adjudicate
morality.

These developments signal a momentous challenge for
“the global and open nature of the Internet” and its potential to be “a driving
force in accelerating progress towards development”, underlined by the UNHRC, in 2012. It
exhorts us to embark on an urgent recasting of the Internet and human rights
debate, through the lens of the right to development.

An Internet that serves development

Thirty years ago, the Declaration
on the Right to Development (DRD) broke new ground in the universal struggle for
greater human dignity, freedom, equality and justice. It appealed to the urgent
need to empower all people, so that they can participate fully and freely in
vital decisions. It demanded equitable distribution of economic resources;
highlighting the marginalization of women, minorities, indigenous peoples,
migrants, older persons, persons with disabilities and the poor.

The DRD redefines development as far deeper and more
complex than a growth and for-profit focus, recognizing the limits of the
current international economic framework in realizing the participatory parity
of all people and all countries.

The DRD however has been a contentious instrument.
Rich countries have systematically dismissed any obligation for international
co-operation (inscribed in Article 6 of the DRD), using the red herring of a
rights-based, individual-focused development model, where provisioning of needs
is seen as the responsibility of country governments. Resolutions in the Human
Rights Council, promoting “a democratic and equitable
international order” are seen as inadmissible by the rich countries. The US state has repeatedly
asserted that the right to development should be the obligations
states owe to their citizens and not the obligations of multilateral
institutions, stalling consensus on the possibility of negotiating a binding
international agreement on this topic.

The DRD's call for states to “take steps, individually
and collectively, to formulate international development policies with a view
to facilitating the full realization of the right to development” encapsulates
the directions that must be taken if the DRD's conception of "active, free
and meaningful participation" can be realized at national and
international levels. US posturing, and its anti-institutional stances on
global democracy are a key impediment in pushing the envelope for discussions
on global justice. The global governance of the Internet seems to be the latest
addition to this extreme and self-serving intransigence.

As the Internet reconstitutes society, the ideas of
self-determination and equality of opportunity, enshrined in the DRD, become
deeply tied to the Internet. To tackle national level obstacles to the
“complete fulfillment of human beings and of peoples, constituted, inter alia,
by the denial of civil, political, economic, social and cultural
rights....", access to the Internet may thus be argued as non-negotiable.
Conversely, in a world where morality, ethics and justice must be urgently
reclaimed from runaway digital capitalism and reinstated within the idea of a
global democracy, we need to turn to the DRD.

In 1990, the Global Consultation on the
Right to Development as a Human Right observed that above all,
"the concentration of economic and political power in the most
industrialized countries" is an obstacle to development and is
"perpetuated by the non-democratic decision-making processes of
international economic, financial and trade institutions." Today, economic
and political power is highly concentrated in one country, the US, as never
before. Digital capitalism is pivotal to this dominance. The corollary is that
legitimate global governance of the Internet must be thwarted. The default
governance regime of the Internet has therefore used powerful discursive
devices – mainly, the smokescreen of multistakeholder participation (to
legitimize the social power of the corporation) and the subterfuge of failed
multilateralism (to delegitimize people's aspirations towards a more just global
order) – to perpetuate a unilateral, undemocratic, global Internet arrangement.

The Global Consultation had also proposed a
decentralized, participatory process for the design of indicators and review of
programmes. The emphasis would be on direct involvement, in UN programe
evaluation, of "the people and groups directly or indirectly affected
through their own representative organizations," including
"indigenous peoples, workers' organizations, women's groups,"
peasants and other so-called "grassroots" organizations, without
regard to their accreditation by the UN Economic and Social Council.

This treats the right to development and its core
emphasis on people's right to participation, as a programmatic norm of
international law, akin to the principle of self-determination. Participants
in the Global Consultation believed, that such a bottom-up, people's
participation was non-negotiable to build political pressure on international
economic institutions. In their avowal of multistakeholderism and an equal
footing for business in global decision-making, the slippery purveyors of
Internet freedom seem to blissfully disregard this foundational concern about
the balance of power. Participatory democracy has been hijacked by business-led
multistakeholderism, and 'presence and power' are replaced as tokens of
people's political involvement.

The undemocratic nature of global Internet governance
is bound to spiral into a multi-dimensional civilizational crisis. The Internet
redefines the experience of and claims to human rights – not only to the rights
to freedom of expression, association, privacy, security, information and
knowledge, but also rights to education, health and livelihood. While it can
potentially expand these, the reality is that it has served as an instrument of
authoritarian excesses and neoliberal capital.

Without international norms and a treaty on the
Internet, it is unclear how the rights to enjoy Internet access, claim its open
and public interest spaces and protect self-determination against data tyranny
will materialize in a seamless, post-national Internet-mediated world.
Meanwhile, the cyborgism of the present is already generating debates on the
human condition – the alienation of the dispossessed and marginal communities
in the current economic order and the rights of those who choose
not to have Internet access.

The
current human rights quandary is therefore not only about asserting a liberal,
I-shall-have-my-Internet ideal; it is also very much the subaltern, republican,
a-better-world-is-possible dream.

About the author

Anita Gurumurthy works for IT for Change, an NGO that works at the intersection of digital technologies and social change, and is engaged in research and policy advocacy on network society, with a focus on governance, democracy and gender justice. Her work reflects a keen interest in southern frameworks and the political economy of internet governance and data regimes.

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